Real data and musings on the performance of networks, servers, protocols, and their related folks.

Monday, April 14, 2008

Monitoring IP changes with NETLINK ROUTE sockets

Yesterday I read a mailing list query asking how to get event driven Linux IP address changes (i.e. without having to poll for them).

I agreed with the attitude of the post. The most important thing about scaling is to make sure the work your code does is proportional to the real event stream. Seems obvious enough, but lots of algorithms screw up that basic premise.

Any time based polling algorithm betrays this scaling philosophy because work is done every tick independent of the events to be processed. You're always either doing unnecessary work or adding latency to real work by waiting for the next tick. The select() and poll() APIs also betray it as these are proportional to the amount of potential work (number of file descriptors) instead of the amount of real work (number of active descriptors) - epoll() is a better answer there.

Event driven is the way to go.

Anyhow, back to the original poster. I knew netlink route sockets could do this - and I had used them in the past for similar purposes. I had to get "man 7 netlink"and google going to cobble together an example and only then did I realize how difficult it is to get started with netlink - it just has not been very widely used and documented.

So the point of this post is to provide a little google juice documentation for event driven monitoring of new IPv4 addresses using netlink. At least this post has a full example - the code is below.

If you need to use this functionality - I recommend man 3 and 7 of both netlink and rtnetlink.. and then go read the included header files, and use my sample as a guide. In this basic way you can get address adds, removals, link state changes, route changes, interface changes, etc.. lots of good stuff. It is at the heart of the iproute tools (ip, ss, etc..) as well most of the userspace routing software (zebra, xorp, vyatta, etc..).